She stepped back from the map. She looked at the apartment.
The living room: the pale blue sofa and the bookshelves and the dining table and the small dancing Ganesha on the table whose paint was slightly worn on the right foot from being touched. The kitchen: the coffee maker and the Coorg ceramic cups and the herbs on the window ledge in their positions. The corridor: the hook where the red silk scarf had been, which was now empty — she had returned it to Layla's family, through the lawyer who was managing Layla's estate, because the scarf was not hers and it had served its purpose and it did not belong in this palace. The bedroom: the photographs on the wall, which she had rearranged, which now included the photograph of her mother's veranda view in the place where the Coorg hillside photograph had been — the hillside photograph moved to a different position, its meaning shifted slightly now that she knew the whole story of what the morning had been.
The apartment was hers. She had woken up in it not knowing whose it was and she had walked through it and it had brought her home.
She went to the notebook stack on the coffee table. She opened the last notebook — not the red ones, not the theoretical green ones. A new one, plain white, that she had started the day the acute phase of the amnesia had resolved, the day she had first said her name out loud in her own voice. She turned to the last written page. She read what she had written that morning — the current map of the palace, what was where, what still needed to be retrieved, what had been built since. The map of a mind in the specific process of returning to itself after the longest five days of its life.
At the bottom of the page she wrote a new entry:
The prosecutor's decision came today. I read it carefully. It was accurate. The case is closed.
The palace is not closed. The palace continues — this is the property of a living palace, that it continues to be built while there is living. I am building the rooms that come after. I don't know yet what they hold. I know I will find out by putting things in them carefully and trusting the system and walking through it when I need to know what I know.
What I know right now: I know my name. I know my address. I know the weight of the Coorg ceramic cup and the position of the rosemary plant and the order of the books on the third shelf and the specific quality of the morning light in Dr. Lata's office. I know which drawer in the kitchen holds the good knife. I know the worn patch on my mother's sofa armrest and the colour of Ananya's new apartment in Mysore from the photographs she sends.
I know that someone spent three years trying to remove me from myself and did not succeed.
I know that the palace survived.
I know that I built it and I know how I built it and I know that the building of it is the work I am going to keep doing — adding rooms, filing things in their correct positions, walking through it when I need to remember who I am. The palace is a practice, not a monument. It doesn't end.
